Andrei Makine - The Crime Of Olga Arbyelina

But her cry froze on her lips. On the bank, near the half ruined pillar, stood a group of very young girls who were going through a complete performance, switching from squeals of admiration after a dive to somewhat disdainful indifference-which was even more provocative to the three divers.

He pushed off from the girder, bending his knees briefly, turned a somersault in the air, split the waters, and vanished into darkness- she had screwed up her eyelids tight. The young female audience applauded when they saw him surfacing. He did not so much as glance at them and went to climb up the derelict shell once more. This time he climbed a little bit higher, standing with his feet on a narrow ledge. The mood in the small group changed to one that children display spontaneously when a game becomes too dangerous. There were a few cries of merriment, but it was clearly put on; then they exchanged uneasy looks, wrongfooted, as they watched his climb, his stillness before the plunge, his flight…

When he reappeared on the surface their voices were almost frightened and discordant, as if they had discovered the existence of a secret, insane reason behind his courage.

He climbed up once more, swayed for a moment on the top girder (one of the girls shouted out a shrill "No!" and sobbed), then regained his balance, opened his arms, flew.

She opened her eyes, became aware of the twigs brushing against her face, the sun causing the smell of hot mud to hover above the glittering water. Her son was alone down there, sitting on a concrete slab. Already dressed, he was lacing up his shoes (that pair he had dreamed of wearing when spring came…). The little group of colorful dresses and his two companions were far away. They were walking along the bank: the boys throwing stones, trying to skim them over the water; their girlfriends shouting as they counted, arguing. Moods change quickly when you're young, observed a voice within her head that she was not listening to… He smoothed down his hair, tucked his shirt into his trousers, threw a glance in the direction of the young people as they walked away, then set off toward the Caravanserai… She did not stir, both hoping and fearing that he might turn and see her and that then by magic, all would be resolved and filled with light, would become simple, like the swaying of these long leaves in front of her eyelashes… But he walked on, his head bowed, without looking behind him. He limped; he seemed used to walking like this.

That night she saw his silhouette once more standing up on the steel shelf before diving. At this stage she found the recollection still heart-stopping but bearable; beneath his fine skin she thought she could detect the pulsing of his heart. He hurled himself from the girder, flew, and in that instant his body became perfect-a shaft of light amid the blackened concrete and the rust…

One by one she pictured the faces of the adolescent girls who had egged on the divers. Those long plunges into a rectangle of water surrounded by ironwork were for the benefit of one of them. (And it was she, perhaps, who had let out a hysterical cry.) Or perhaps it was for the one who, on the contrary, displayed the most complete indifference to the spectacle. The caprices of these youthful attractions are always unpredictable. With all its sentimental banality, this thought suddenly made her feel better, releasing the tension in her body which, since the scene on the riverbank, had been reduced to a stifling, clammy spasm. "Yes, it's the age he's at," she thought, buoyed along by this inner relaxation. "His age and the fine spring weather." She recalled the brightly colored dresses and the naive, innocent cut of them, the stroll beside the water… And nature's sweet daily progress toward the joy and idleness of summer. Her son was simply being drawn into the wholly seasonal tide of first loves, and late sunsets. Important too, was the cheerful assurance the doctor-just-between-ourselves had given her: everything was not all that serious. A momentary vision flashed before her eyes, the ghost of a dream – one of those little dresses walking beside the painfully recognizable figure of her son…

With a start she broke free from this reverie, got up, and switched on the lamp whose base had been stuck together again with strips of paper. The lamp. The bed. The dark, cold stove. The curtains with the narrow strip of night. And in her mind's eye that couple, two young people in love on a summer's evening… The discord was agonizing. All that had happened in that room during the winter nights was accepted and acceptable, pardonable and pardoned on this one condition: that afterward there would be nothing, a void, a bottomless nothingness… death. But now this springtime, the summer evening stroll she had pictured, that seemed so likely; this puppy love so stupidly natural and legitimate; all this naive and sunny healthiness of life was banishing their winter into the realms of the unspeakable. In his eyes, after all, what could this room be to him now?

Her thoughts flitted among a thousand things, seeking the solace of a memory, the ghost of a day; but the summer sun hounded her, hounded her on the riverbank, toward sounds, toward voices. "How easy it is," she said to herself with sudden bitterness. "A little cotton print dress, a little coquetry, and presto, he's ready to do anything for you…" She stopped herself, this jealousy seemed too absurd. And, above all: "No, no, he didn't give a hoot for any of their dresses… He was diving to… to…"

To kill himself… She could not check the racing of her thoughts-accurate, trivial, serious, futile, essential… She needed to hit upon some idea that was logical and perfectly obvious; one that would offer her a respite. "Wait, wait. The bridge. Yes, the bridge… Well, the bridge was not as high as all that. The topmost girder was probably only six feet above the water…"

Then a surprising visual change took place. The giddy height she had observed in terror during those suicidal dives subsided in her memory, and was now scarcely as tall as a human figure. She no longer knew if she had really seen that girder poised, as it had seemed to her, high against the sky. Indeed, she was now sure that it had all been almost harmless sport, a few perfectly safe dives. She remembered the young spectators on the bank. She thought she could clearly see one of them holding hands with her son and coming back to the Caravanserai with him…

"No! He came home alone!" a very precise memory objected within her. But already the vision of the two young people on a path beside the river seemed to her to have been actually, certainly, observed, indelibly fixed in her mind. She was astonished to realize that it was enough to picture a face or a place for them to become quite naturally transformed into things experienced.

Dazed, she attempted to find some clear, indisputable reality amid the chaos of her thoughts. By an inexplicable caprice of memory this turned out to be the face of the nurse at the retirement home. The unhappy woman who took pleasure in making fun of the gift she had received, the shawl she had accepted one winter's evening… Now her face was tinged with a repentant softness, her lips trembled as she uttered words of apology. And once again this repentance seemed… no! quite simply it was completely authentic. Yes, the encounter had occurred several days previously.

For a moment she succeeded in thinking of nothing, still sitting on the edge of the bed, leaning forward slightly, her eyes half closed, expressionless. That was how she saw herself in the mirror facing the bed. A naked woman, motionless, in the middle of a spring night. This precise mirror image calmed her. She turned her head toward the window, her double in the glass did the same. Smoothed the blanket. The other one repeated her gesture with precision. It was then that the lamp caught her eye…